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When dictator Moammar Gadhafi was killed in October 2011, months after the first wave of uprisings swept Libya as part of the larger Arab Spring, international analysts declared the North African country finally free.

But two years later, there are ethnic and tribal tensions and parts of the country are overrun by armed militia and religious hardliners.

Another significant challenge is from climate change, according to an essay in “The Arab Spring and Climate Change,” a study recently published by three think-tanks in Washington.

If the new government does not address the issue of water shortages, Libya could see more turmoil, Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell write in their essay, which examines Libya’s water and desertification problems.

“Water could cause great insecurity there,” Femia says.

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Libya is oil rich, water poor.

Desert covers much of the country and some areas don’t see any rainfall for years, even as long as a decade.

It is going to get worse, say a growing body of climatologists.

A recent report by Joshua Busby at the University of Texas, Austin, notes that between now and the middle of the century, some of the wettest and most populated areas of Libya, along the Mediterranean coast, are likely to experience increases in drought days — meaning no rainfall — from a current 101, to a whopping 224.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released similar findings in the Journal of Climate in October 2011. That study said climate change is already responsible for the prolonged drought in Libya’s most-populous areas on the coast.

A report last year by Oceana, a nonprofit group fighting for ocean conservation, said Libya will also see a significant decline in fish stocks due to climate change and ocean acidification.

Gadhafi ruled Libya with an iron fist. For more than three decades, he got what he wanted. This includes the spectacular — or unwise, depending on who you talk to — Great Man Made River project.

Gadhafi started the project in the 1960s and it is said to be the largest and the most expensive irrigation development in the world.

Its pumps water from the vast, underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south and takes it, via a network of pipelines, to the populated coastal areas in the north, where most of the country’s six million citizens live and work.

It consists of more than 1,300 wells, some as deep as 500 metres, and it supplies about 6.5 million cubic metres of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi and Sirte.

The ancient aquifers store 40,000-year-old reserves of pure drinking water in the world’s largest known fossil water aquifer system.

Gadhafi called the project the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The aquifer accumulated the water during the last ice age, but is not currently being replenished.

Femia calls it unsustainable.

According to reports, Libyans who worked on the project claimed water from the aquifer would last hundreds of years. Climatologists say it could run out in 50 years at the present rate of consumption.

“What will Libya do then?” asks Femia. “Water insecurity is a huge threat to the country.”

But the draining of the aquifer isn’t Libya’s only problem.

If Libya starts extracting even more groundwater from the Nubian aquifer to deal with drought, it could cause tension with neighbours Egypt, Chad and Sudan, all of which share the aquifer.

It has the potential to destabilize the region, Femia and Werrell say.

It is easy to see how these conditions multiply the threats already facing the country’s new government, says Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton scholar who wrote an introduction to the study.

But all is not lost, not yet.

The Libyan interim government sent representatives to the UN climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011 to promote a solar and wind power project financed by oil money.

The country now has the opportunity to “transition not just to a post-Gadhafi era but also to a new era of resilience — one that uses its finite resources wisely and adapts itself to a changing climate,” say Femia and Werrell.

Libya should be looking at better ways of irrigation and growing crops that require less water.

Climate change may not be the No. 1 priority in Libya today, but climatologists say it should not remain off the table for long. Tackling it can potentially help Libya in its search for unity, says Femia.

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